30 Minutes with Photoshop

I have a desk­top wid­get that acts as a sideshows pho­to frame on my devel­op­ment machine. Hav­ing some­thing pleas­ant to stare at when my mind goes blank on a prob­lem is nice.

This morn­ing, dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly intense “now how the hell is that sup­posed to work” spell the pho­to below came up.

big file of the original photo
fish foun­tain in Oaxaca

Click on the pho­to to see a much big­ger ver­sion of the original.

I like the pho­to but it was tak­en with my lit­tle point and shoot and has way too much depth of field. I real­ly don’t need to be able to iden­ti­fy the make and mod­el of the cars in the back ground. So I loaded it into Pho­to­shop and spent half and hour or so mak­ing a quick and dirty improve­ment. A lit­tle selec­tive select­ing and copy­ing. Then a cou­ple of rounds with the blur fil­ter and I got this.

a nicer version of the Fish Fountain photo
a nicer ver­sion of the Fish Foun­tain photo

Again click on the pho­to for a much larg­er ver­sion. Don’t look too close­ly though. The illu­sion of shal­low­er depth of field works fine in the 400 X 300 pix­el ver­sion above but you can see the seams between the lay­ers and some oth­er arti­facts in the larg­er ver­sion. Still for half an hour of futz­ing around I end­ed up with a much nicer pho­to to use on a web page.

About the Author

Lara Harriger